Tulum has cut its known illegal dumping sites from more than 45 to 11 in recent months, though people keep unloading trash at the ones that remain, the municipality's public services director said.
Audomaro Solís Pacheco, head of the Dirección General de Servicios Públicos, put the reduction at close to 75 percent. He credited 24 collection trucks and a standing program that sends crews back to the same points to haul away whatever has accumulated since their last pass.
What is left is not a bookkeeping detail. The 11 sites sit in a municipality with no sanitary landfill of its own, on ground where rain filters fast through porous limestone toward the aquifer that feeds Tulum's cenotes and its stretch of the Caribbean. Municipal officials have pointed to that path, and to the vermin and mosquitoes the piles attract, when explaining why the sites are cleared on a schedule rather than left alone.
A 75 percent drop and 24 trucks on the route
"Right now we have around 11 clandestine sites detected. We have a program to collect the garbage from these places and keep them from turning into a focus of disease or health problems. Unfortunately, though, people keep dumping garbage there," Solís Pacheco said.
The wording matters. The program empties the sites; it does not close them. Each visit resets a spot to bare ground and leaves it open for the next load, which is why the same addresses keep returning to the crews' route. The director did not say when the count last stood above 45, or where the 11 that survive are located.
Colonia Cristal is the clearest case on the record. Municipal crews hauled waste out of the neighborhood on July 31, and it was the third time that same site had been cleared. Mayor Diego Castañón Trejo said then that the collection service exists precisely so residents do not have to leave their waste on an empty lot.
Illegal dumping in Tulum that nobody reports
The missing piece, in Solís Pacheco's account, is not equipment. It is complaints. Almost nobody reports the dumping, he said, and without a report there is rarely a name attached to the pile. He gave no figure for how many reports the municipality has received. He asked residents who see it happening to record it and send the video to the municipal government's accounts, Instagram @ayuntamientodetulum and Facebook @AyuntamientoDeTulum.
"We need the public to help us. If they see someone dumping garbage, let them record it so we can expose that bad practice and have the evidence to proceed against those responsible," he said.
A phone video does two jobs in that description. It shames the practice publicly, and it gives the municipality a plate, a face, or a time stamp that a case can be built on. The channels he offered are the Ayuntamiento's social media accounts, which is where the complaint starts rather than at a formal desk.
Two drivers caught in the act, two vehicles impounded
Around seven people have been detected dumping waste illegally since the current municipal administration took office in 2024, Solís Pacheco said. Two of them were caught while using vehicles to unload. Those vehicles were sent to the impound lot, and their owners were fined. Neither the amounts nor the drivers' identities were disclosed.
Seven people, against a problem that at its peak covered more than 45 sites.
Civic judges decide the fines
The public services department does not set the penalty. It documents the case and puts the offender at the disposal of the civic judges, who determine the fine and any other sanction. Solís Pacheco was explicit about where his office stops. It detains and delivers, and the decision on what the dumping costs is made somewhere else.
The landfill Tulum still does not have
He also named the gap underneath the whole operation. Tulum needs a sanitary landfill of its own, he said, to strengthen the way the municipality handles waste from collection to final disposal.
That gap is on the record. The state Environmental Protection Agency reported in May that Tulum's shuttered old dump still has an open administrative case with a pending fine of about 1.3 million pesos, and it placed the municipality among those in Quintana Roo with the most serious compliance problems under the federal standard for waste sites.
Eleven sites remain on the department's list. Crews will keep emptying them, and by the director's own account, they will keep filling again, until residents start naming who unloads there or the municipality has somewhere of its own to take what the trucks pick up.
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